The U.S. pondered shooting nuke at the moon

It was a headline online that I simply couldn't pass up: "How the U.S. planned to blow up the moon."

After staring at it for a few moments, I finally clicked on it and found out the story is true! In the late 1950s, the U.S. government studied the possibility of launching a rocket with a nuclear weapon attached toward the moon. The plan, according to published reports, was for the device to travel 238,000 miles to the moon, where it would detonate upon impact.

No doubt, it would have been a spectacular explosion and a show that likely would have been visible, at least in some way, from Earth. And it would have scared the socks off the Soviet Union.

That, after all, was the goal. the idea was to flex a little muscle in the space race. Military officials, led by the U.S. Air Force, reportedly chose not to make the attempt because of possible dangers to people on Earth if the missile failed and detonated within our atmosphere.

Perhaps even stranger than the mere thought of sending a nuke to the moon was the name attached to it. A young graduate student named Carl Sagan - the very same famous astronomer - helped calculate the behavior of dust that would have been thrust upward after such a blast and the gases generated during a detonation.

I actually can follow the logic on this one - at least to a point. These were the days when it was clear which nations were enemies with others. The Soviet Union had taken the lead in the space race with Sputnik, the first man-made satellite launched into orbit. To say Americans at the time were a bit frightened of the power of the Soviets having control of space would be an understatement.

So just imagine how the momentum would shift if people in Moscow were looking up to the moon when a huge explosion lights up the sky, even just a little bit. Then, imagine the fear at hearing that the Americans caused that explosion to happen.

Would it have ended the nuclear proliferation? Probably not. In fact, I tend to think it would have made a nuclear war more likely because nothing speeds up bad situations like fear - whether that dispute is between 8-year-olds on the playground or world leaders trying to guess what an adversary is thinking.

Thankfully, the people in charge decided it wasn't a good idea to launch a nuclear weapon toward the moon. No weapon was launched. No nuke exploded. No radioactive dust was lifted from the moon's surface. No radiation from a weapons detonation harmed the men who landed on the moon.

Thank goodness for cooler heads.

So remember. Next time you walk outside and look at the moon, ponder what it would look like with another, this time man-made, crater.